Heian era
Pink Dianthus & Water— 撫子と水色
The soft pink of wild dianthus beside the translucent blue of mountain water.
Collection · 8 palettes
Y2K Color Palettes
Bubblegum pink, cyber lilac, sky blue — the early-2000s revival, historically grounded.
The Y2K aesthetic that designers have been reaching for since 2022 isn't actually a 2000s thing — it's an emotional shorthand for optimism, playfulness, and a specific register of digital-era color. The surprising thing is that Wada's 1933 catalog already contained those combinations, pulled from flower dyes and glazed ceramics rather than plastic and pixels. 'Nadeshiko' (撫子 — fringed pink) is the exact hot-pink of a 2001 flip phone. 'Sora' (空 — sky) is Windows XP blue filtered through a Kyoto summer. 'Fuji' (藤 — wisteria) is the early-iMac translucent lilac. 'Sakura' (桜) beside bright pop green is the TRL-era color moment pulled back to its flower-pigment source. These palettes are reference material for nostalgia-driven packaging, streetwear capsule collections, beauty and skincare relaunches, playful digital products, and any brand that wants the energy of 2001 without the cringe. Most people arrive with a specific canon in mind — bubblegum and hot pink, icy and electric blue, translucent lilac, lime and pop green, plus chrome and metallic silver — and Wada's plates answer nearly all of it: Nadeshiko (#EBA6B4) is the bubblegum, Mizu (#B4D6E5) and Sora (#7AB2D3) the icy and electric blues, Fuji (#B5A6C9) the lilac, Wakatake the pop green. The metallic register is here too, in the silver pairings — Murasaki-gin (紫銀) and Hanada-gin (花田銀) each set a colour against #BCBCBE — and in the gold of Shu-kuro-kin (朱黒金). The one thing 1933 cannot supply is chrome as a specular render: that is a screen effect rather than a pigment, and no flower dye has an equivalent. Everything else the aesthetic reaches for turns out to have a pre-digital ancestor, which is the whole point of this collection.
Studio
Off the screen
You have the y2k color palettes in front of you. These are the materials a colour study like this actually gets made with.
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This site hands you hex codes. Color Bridge is the deck that shows what an RGB or HTML value becomes as CMYK ink, and which Pantone spot sits nearest it — the translation step between a screen palette and a printed one. Coated and uncoated because the same ink is not the same colour on both stocks.
Listed on Amazon as Pantone GP6102B Color Bridge Guide Set Coated & Uncoated, Multi-Colour
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Pantone
Color Bridge Guide — coated
The coated half on its own — Pantone to CMYK, RGB and HTML in a single fan. The smaller entry point if your work only ever goes onto coated stock.
Listed on Amazon as Pantone Color Bridge Guide Coated | Pantone to CMYK, RGB & HTML Color Matching Fan Deck for Graphic Design, Branding & Print | GG6103B
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Calibrite
ColorChecker Studio spectrophotometer
A spectrophotometer profiles the whole chain — display, printer, projector, scanner — so the colour you picked is the colour that comes out the other end. The full-fidelity option for work that ends up printed.
Listed on Amazon as Calibrite ColorChecker Studio Spectrophotometer for Complete Color Management for Display, Projector, Printer and Scanner Profiling
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Calibrite
Display Plus HL colorimeter kit
A colorimeter calibrates the monitor itself. Worth saying plainly: an uncalibrated screen is the most common reason a palette that looked right on your desk looks wrong everywhere else.
Listed on Amazon as Calibrite Video Photo Kit with Display Plus HL Colorimeter and ColorChecker Passport Video 2, 10,000 Nit Monitor Calibration, Camera Color Matching
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Calibrite
ColorChecker Passport Photo 2
A pocket target for fixing white balance and exposure at the moment of capture — the step before any colour correction, if your palette starts from a photograph rather than a screen.
Listed on Amazon as Calibrite ColorChecker Passport Photo 2 Portable Color Calibration Kit for Photo and Video, 4 Target Set for White Balance, Exposure and Creative Look
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Kuretake
Gansai Tambi 24 — Art Nouveau
Gansai are traditional Japanese watercolour pans — dense, matte and easy to mix, the closest everyday medium to the flat printed colour Wada's plates were made in. This is the Art Nouveau-themed 'II' edition, a different 24 to the standard set.
Listed on Amazon as Kuretake GANSAI TAMBI Watercolor Paint Set 24 Colors II - Art Nouveau
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Kuretake
Gansai Tambi 36
The larger pan set. More range means mixing toward a specific plate rather than approximating it from six colours.
Listed on Amazon as Kuretake GANSAI TAMBI Watercolor Paint Set 36 Colors
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140 lb cold press is the weight that takes a wet wash without buckling — the paper most colour studies end up on.
Listed on Amazon as Strathmore 300 Series Tape Bound Watercolor Pad, 140 lb. Cold Press, 11 X 15 inches, White, 12 Sheets (360-111)
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Pentel
Fude Touch brush sign pen
A felt brush tip for the labelling and linework around a swatch study — the annotation half of a colour notebook.
Listed on Amazon as Pentel Fude Touch Sign Pen, Black, Felt Pen Like Brush Stroke (SES15C-A) 3 Pieces
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When a palette leaves the screen, this is the shared vocabulary between you and the press. Coated and uncoated because the same ink is not the same colour on both.
Listed on Amazon as Pantone Formula Guide – Coated & Uncoated | Professional PMS Color Matching System for Print, Packaging & Graphic Design | GP1601B
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From the archive
Support the archive The full catalog, on your disk, as a thank-you.
- All 378 palettes (348 Wada + 30 editorial) in five formats
- Figma design tokens (W3C-spec JSON, drag into any file)
- Tailwind v4 + v3 configs — drop into any project
- CSS custom properties — every plate, one stylesheet
- 378 museum SVG plates — print-ready at any size
- Full JSON — colors, names, eras, moods, dominant hues
See what's inside
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Library
Colour books worth owning
The theory and reference behind palettes like this — recommended on Amazon.
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